Just a quick note tonight. If you haven’t yet read it, you might well find something provocative in Ben Lehman’s newest guest-post at Vincent Baker’s blog: Rules and Their Functions. Besides being a thoughtful read on its own, it has got a great discussion happening in its (albeit unthreaded) comments section.

The thrust of the piece is that RPG rules fall into two distinct types—continuous rules and immediate rules—that we interact with in meaningfully different ways during play. From Lehman’s post:

Rules in role-playing games perform two distinct functions, and for the moment let’s say that they fall into two distinct types. There are what we might call “continuous rules,” which continually shape our play process. Examples of this might be “I’m a GM; I control the world and the minor characters” [...]

Alternatively, we can think of rules which perform immediate, direct functions on the fiction of the game. We might call these “immediate rules.” These are rules like “when you act under fire, roll 2d6. On a 7+ …” [...] They are engaged only in specific, immediate instances.

[via anyway: Rules and Their Functions]

I’ve talked elsewhere about implicit and explicit rules in RPGs, about things that are presumed to be understood and things that benefit from (or outright require) being stated outright, and the difference therein. I talk in panels and seminars (as I will at Gen Con this year) about establishing things and then letting them run in the background, and I think it’s fair to describe (some of?) those things as rules. For me, the foreground/background, active/passive, explicit/implicit language fits my head better than continuous/immediate, but we’re not talking about exactly the same thing… and I’m about to conflate Lehman’s post (which is about rules) with dramaturgy and setting, so maybe I should stop.

Anyway, I found myself nodding along with a lot of what Lehman was saying in this post. I’m still meditating on it (and am finding the discussion loaded with jargon that I’m not always in love with), but for sure I’ll be thinking about this post as I press forward on this summer’s numerous RPG projects. Go forth and do thou likewise, if you’re so inclined.

Did you read these posts? Over on his blog, Ryan Macklin wrote about what he calls use-whenever stats and why they don’t quite work for him:

Give me a situation and a generic approach, and I’ll make them fit. Which really means I have these three stats:

• d10 Be a successful-but-one-note character
• d8 Show a but more color to your character, at a penalty
• d6 Like I’m going to use this stat

This sparked a post from Dan Maruschak about emotional versus rational decision-making in RPG play, in which Maruschak considers the psychological aspects of the issue:

When one choice is obviously mechanically better then the rational part of the player’s brain will feel obligated to pick the most mechanically advantageous option, even if the emotional part of the brain thinks its an unsatisfying one. In my opinion, this kind of breakdown usually manifests as either one-note characters (if the player follows the obligation) or a reduced emotional connection to the game (since the the player is using emotional energy to deny the obligation and play the character “right”).

This is especially provocative to me, lately, because I’ve been playtesting a couple of games with widely applicable abilities—abilities that apply to certain plays based almost wholly on their fictional boundaries—and I’ve been considering the differences between pushing and pulling a player towards certain kinds of plays. It’s sometimes the difference between being enticing and being demanding, between procedure and provocation. Do you force a player-character to swing swords against shields first, or is that a strategy you make attractive through the interactions of abilities? Do you make attacks against armor or ennui mechanically identical but fictionally distinct? Is your audience invested enough in the fiction to make emotional decisions despite the rational consequences?

Can Forceful ever be as quick as Quick? What makes use-whenever stats equal versus making them identical? How much overlap can stats have in their Venn diagrams before they’re functionally interchangeable? I personally like stats to have a little overlap, to allow for creative play and multiple approaches to the same solution, but games with rigidly demarcated abilities are often tighter play experiences.

Want to fire a bow? That’s Dexterity. Want to swing a sword? That’s Strength. Without a feat, never shall they overlap. (In D&D, the overlap between Skills and other abilities is often up to the DM and often fluid.)

Want to Manipulate someone? That’s roll+hot. Manipulate someone with a show of force? To roll+hard and get a promise from someone might be a custom move—a bit of temporary overlap before the abilities snap back to their default positions. (In Apocalypse World, moves are practically mapped to hotkeys, though custom moves let you hotwire the whole thing.)

Anyway. I’m just thinking out loud right now.

IGN Australia asked a wide array of video-game developers about the role of storytelling in games and got a lot of good answers. In this first part of a three-part feature, IGN asks “How has storytelling in video games matured over the last decade or so? Has it matured?” and “How sophisticated is video game storytelling compared to other mediums? Is there anything holding it back?”

If you’re like me, you’ll find lots of provocative material in this piece. Like this bit, from an answer to that first question from Quantic Dream’s David Cage:

I don’t think that storytelling in games has matured over the last decade. There are many reasons for this: the first one is that video games are still exclusively based on physical actions, whether it is shooting someone, destroying something or jumping on a platform. No decent story can be told where the hero can only do ten basic physical actions.

What do you think? What’re your answers to those IGN questions?

Writer and thinker, Ian Bogost (author of Persuasive Games) calls it “vampire” or “write-only” publishing: books, especially scholarly books, that are not written to be read but are written to “have been written.” Check out Ian Bogost’s “Writing Books People Want to Read (Or, How to Stake Vampire Publishing)” over on his site. You’ll come into the middle of an ongoing discussion worth having, in my opinion. It’s about exactly the kinds of books that Gameplaywright Press strives to avoid. This is one of the reasons we are slow to produce books—if we don’t want to read it, we don’t make it.

We—gamers and loudmouths in general, Gameplaywright Press in particular—have lots of great subjects for books waiting to be written. The trick is producing that idea in a way that isn’t dry, isn’t dull, isn’t pretending to be academic just so we can say we take a subject seriously. We can take a subject seriously and also use words like fuckwit, I think. (See Things We Think About Games.)

Some of the best writing about game design and ludic thinking is happening on blogs and Twitter right now. This is fine. This is good. This is, at the very least, value neutral. It’s partway between publishing and discourse, which is just about where I want these kinds of ideas to be exchanged—a bit of formality, a bit of authorship, a bit of shop talk. Sometimes we’re offering researched data points, sometimes we’re saying, “Hey, I just got a crazy idea!” Both are useful.

I bring this up because Ian Bogost got me thinking. Also, with the summer hobby-gaming convention season almost upon us, and no new Gameplaywright Press book in sight, I thought it was important to talk a bit about the future: we’re planning at least a couple of new books (and book-like things), but we’d like to hear more from you, dear reader.

Tell us: What do you want to read? Do you prefer blogs to books? What was the last book about games you read?

Tell us more than that, if you like. We’re curious about you.

What do you look for in RPG books describing or detailing historical periods of play?

Graham Walmsley asks over at the Story Games forums, and I thought I’d echo the question here, to get some more takes on the subject. What do you like to see? What do you need to see? What justifies the purchase or the time spent reading an RPG book when you could be reading a straight-up history book?

Turn it around, too: What irks you? What diminishes your enthusiasm for an historical setting for play? Has a book ever convinced you that a particular setting was a terrible time or place to play in? How did that happen?

I’ve long thought that part of any historical setting book’s job was to grant license to play amid the history. Not to observe or recite or recreate, but to play. That means giving out toys (in the form of people, places, customs, trivia) and permission and authority to experiment.

I’m tempted to say, here, that historical-setting books should actually be story guides. They should concern themselves with the stories to be found at the intersection of time and place—focus on the conflicts and the characters. Don’t just show us the proper way to address a Spanish duke (or whatever), but show me why I’d want to or what the consequences are for not doing it right. That’s conflict. Don’t just tell me who people were, tell me what they want and why they don’t have it yet. That makes them characters.

Fill the book with potential energy. Things should be on the verge of happening, whenever the book is set.

The truth, though, is that I’ve enjoyed plenty of game books that employ other approaches. So I don’t think it’s my way or the highway. Just thinking about this has me that much more excited to hear what you like in historical-setting books.